ABSTRACT
Thinking about 'the body' in relation to ways of knowing and being is a central intellectual and political matter across disciplinary perspectives. The body has become a vital site of experimentation rather than a fleshy container or an essentialized object that can be definitively known. French feminists in the 1980s and 1990s were writing the body into philosophy, mobilising feminine morphology to speak of women's difference and identity 'yet to come'. Postqualitative research questions conventional assumptions about 'human experience' where the imagined body contains a sovereign self as a differentiation from the nonhuman material world. Deleuze and Guattari's thinking about what a body can 'do' has opened up more distributed understandings of agentic capacities concerning forces of desire, affective intensities and assemblages, in contrast with humanist interpretivism concerned with the agentic meaning of bodily experience.
